When the original Monster Hunter Stories launched back in 2016, Capcom’s series’ wasn’t exactly unloved, yet it was still a relatively niche concern in the west – loved by a dedicated core, but yet to capture the mainstream imagination.
How much can change over five years. Its sequel launches to a world that’s truly fallen for Monster Hunter – thanks in no small part to the breakout success of Monster Hunter World, which opened up the series to a whole new audience, which was followed up handsomely by this year’s exquisite Monster Hunter Rise.
Monster Hunter Stories 2Publisher: CapcomDeveloper: Capcom/MarvelousAvailability: Out July 9th on Switch and PC
Monster Hunter Stories 2 picks up the turn-based template of the original, and once again is being handled by Capcom’s internal team with the assistance of Marvelous – only this time it’s coming to both Switch and PC (where you can expect 144fps support among other bells and whistles), and day and date with its release in Japan.
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin – Trailer 5 Watch on YouTube
Ahead of a demo releasing later this week, we sat down with series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin director Kenji Oguro and art director Takahiro Kawano to talk through what’s changed this time out, and what’s next for the series.
Before we get to Monster Hunter Stories 2, I wanted to rewind a little bit and talk about the genesis of the first game. What was the intention behind making a spin off, turn-based Monster Hunter?
Ryozo Tsujimoto: The genesis of the Stories series goes back about 13 years ago, actually – so about eight years before the original game even came out. We had ideas in our minds a few years into the Monster Hunter series – what would it be like to take this hunting action gameplay and translate it into a turn based Japanese RPG style system. It was just something that was bouncing around in our heads – series mainstay Kaname Fujioka and myself were talking and thinking it’d be fun, but nothing really concrete came of it until a few years later, when we had a chance to actually get a concept together and speak to the director Mr. Oguro. It was a matter of thinking about how to translate that action gameplay into turn based, but also how to differentiate from the main series visually. That was five years ago now, and that’s how the series got started.
I’ve been playing a bit and it looks fantastic. When it comes to that visual atmosphere it’s changed a bit – what were you trying to achieve this time out?
Kenji Oguro: With the original, we wanted to go a bit more broad appeal than the main series was at the time. But looking back at the feedback we got after the release of Monster Hunter stories, one, we probably skewed a little bit too much in a more childlike direction. And some players felt that it wasn’t as grown up as they’d like to be seen playing. It’s kind of the same idea where we want to take the feedback from one and based on that we want Monster Hunter Stories 2 to be more broadly appealing than the first game ended up being. And to do that, – we’ll probably hear from the art director in a second – but we had to take a different approach on the graphics and make it more a little bit more grown up looking and feeling.
Takahiro Kawano: To achieve that goal of broadening the appeal, based on feedback from the first game I wanted to change up the proportions of the character designs. So you can see they look a bit less sort of chibi or what they call deformed in Japan. And they look a bit more grown up. There’s more detail in ways that I think give the game a bit of a different, richer atmosphere – not just in the characters, but in the gear they wear, even in the stages that they inhabit.